Salt
by Regency
Summary: Written for International Day of Femslash Crossover challenge. The world is coming to an end and Casey Novak is having drinks with an undead Amber Volakis. That seems fitting.


Author: Regency

Title: Salt

Crossover: _House, M.D. / Law & Order: SVU_

Pairing: Amber Volakis / Casey Novak friendship+, implied Amber/Wilson, implied Casey/Liv, implied Liv/Alex

Rating: PG-13-ish for one fairly nasty attack with beer nuts.

Word count: 2,477

Spoilers: for _House_, end of season four; for _SVU_, end of season nine.

Summary: The world is coming to an end and Casey Novak is having drinks with an undead Amber Volakis. That seems fitting.

**AN: Written for the 2009 International Day of Femslash at the Femslash Crossover community. **_**Prompt (from the cross_my_heart 2008 IDoF table): the coming of the apocalypse.**_

AN II: I think I mixed in a bit of _Revelations_ style Armageddon here. Hope that's all right. This also a little crack!tastic, but then again, I'm a little cracked. I hope you enjoy anyway. Constructive criticism is always welcome.

**Explanation (since it seems necessary): These two characters have never met because they're from different shows, so I've had to make up a relationship for them. Also, one happens to be dead. Since this is also the end of the world as they know it, they're understandably a bit distracted. If you're not familiar with both fandoms, this story probably won't be easy to follow. Sorry about that.**

Disclaimer: I don't own either the recognizable character from _House, M.D._ or any characters recognizable as being from _Law & Order: Special Victims Unit_. They are the property of their respective producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

~!~

"This could be worse," the blonde muttered into her drink.

"Oh," said the other blonde of a fruitier shade. "Tell me how."

"You could be interviewing rape victims instead of sipping a Cuba Libre on a Wednesday afternoon." It was lame and not really an attempt at comfort, but it was Amber and Casey had some appreciation for that.

"Well, as long as the end of the world is comfortable, I guess I shouldn't worry, then." She ignored the rumble that seemed to emanate from the core of the Earth to shudder the world around them.

"I wouldn't," she shrugged and crossed her longer-than-life legs like she was on the cover of _Vogue._ She'd never had the looks, but she'd always gotten looks. Amber was lovely and Casey had a slight case of envy. "Don't bother," she said, taking another swish of her Cosmpolitan_._

"Don't bother with what," Casey questioned. Sometimes she felt like she hadn't been present for the entire conversation with Amber. Half of it was had in her head where her ambition slept and the other with some poor slob whom she couldn't forget. Casey didn't envy that. She had a poor—beautiful—detective or two onboard herself. Still, she wondered. "Amber?"

Amber inhaled instinctually. "Envy is not how I'd play this one, Casey." She stirred her drink with her index finger. It changed color on contact, one more thing that people couldn't do once upon a time—something the living still couldn't. Noting her gaze, Amber went on: "Parlor tricks are not worth seeing what's to come. You're lucky. You just die and move on. I got stuck in limbo and now I'm moving to the back of the bus." Amber winced, as did Casey, in sympathy. "You think I'd have learned to talk around that more gracefully, all things considered."

"You don't talk for a living." She got an eyebrow for her own lack of tact. "Whatever. This day is weird enough. I'm not going to be PC when I'm having a conversation with a woman that's been dead for over a year. Spare me your sensitivity."

"You try having those bastards poke and prod you for hours after you were a corpse-sicle and see how it leaves you. I'm a little irritable."

Casey took a drink. "Not a little."

"Would you like an invitation to the nearest bus accident, because I can drag you to one," Amber stated with more than appropriate menacing.

"I thought you were at peace." The former attorney briefly recalled a tale of bright light and comfy seat cushions on a bus to Eternity.

The formerly late young doctor scoffed. "I thought I was in heaven. No, I was on the bus route from hell. Snaps for the archangel who presented that plan to the Chamber of Commerce upstairs." She gestured to the ceiling with her drink. "This—this is why most doctors are atheists. Some stuff is just not hilarious."

"True," Casey agreed, tossing back the last mouthful of alcohol and catching the lime peel in her teeth. "But, the world as we know it is pretty much coming to an end; so, I'm thinking they don't give much of a damn about customer service anymore."

"If they ever did." Amber slammed her martini glass to the counter and it was immediately filled once more. No need for bartenders when you had the all-powerful undead for patrons.

"Share the wealth," she tapped her own dry glass. Amber tickled the stem right after and _voila!_

It didn't last and neither did the Cosmo. Upside number two of being the living dead was no hangover for the lush. Her friend could hit the good stuff till it hit back and keep on ticking. Casey, for her part, was about ready to die of alcohol poisoning. Might have been preferable to whatever was coming.

Literally, whatever. They had no idea what was about to destroy the world, but something had already begun to. People being people, they'd immediately begun to take advantage. The re-animated corpses had been a bit of shock though.

She had not expected to wake up one morning to find an introspective Amber Volakis sitting on her couch, watching the news on her television. Her first reaction had been to scream. When that gleaned little more than an annoyed sigh from her guest and a "Shut it, kid!" from her neighbor, she'd bought a clue and took a seat.

"_I'm embarrassed for you and I don't even live here," Amber had remarked halfheartedly as she'd begun to flip through the channels. Anything that didn't scream 'End of the world!' in bold print seemed preferable to the desperately subdued panic the newscasters were sporting. They ended up on a re-run of Women's Murder Club that went unwatched once Amber had hit the mute button._

"_So," Casey had begun._

"_So," Amber began, too. "Your job's about to get harder. Isn't it against the law to prosecute dead people?"_

"_With your record of breaking & entering, I'd like to try setting a precedent."_

"_And you will fail, as—"_

"_Shut up, Amber," she interrupted._

"_Too soon," she asked, head tipped inquisitively._

"_Forever will be too soon to joke about my being disbarred." Casey stopped herself in place, hands up. "What exactly is happening here? You're dead. You're so dead, you're dust."_

"_Shut up, Casey."_

_Casey smirked. "Too soon?"_

"Stop smiling, you smug Ally McBeal wannabe," Amber snapped as if aware of where Casey's thoughts had gone. At the end of her glass again, she pushed it aside without refilling it.

"Not as long as I live, Doogie Howser." Casey bared her teeth in a less than kind grin. Amber had made her existence a chunk of hell in life, it only made sense for her to return the favor in limbo.

"We've been over this whole 'I can totally kill you' aspect of me, right?" Amber was leaning sideways against the bar, gratuitously nibbling a handful of beer nuts.

"I can say 'Bite me in a few languages. Would you like to hear?" Casey stole one of her nuts for the hell of it and chewed it down. She coughed suddenly; it was like a salt shaker had been poured into her mouth. She reached for her glass and was alarmed to find it gone. The coughs came harder and she gagged against the sensation of salt grains rubbing away at her throat. She tasted iron and felt the blood dripping down the corner of her mouth.

Seated beside her, her companion looked on without a hint of enjoyment on her face. In fact, she looked almost sad. Casey realized who was doing this, but what was at a loss for what to do about it.

"I don't know why you think you can outsmart me, Casey. I've lived my entire life outsmarting people who think they're better than me. With one exception, I have always beaten them. I will beat you." She reached behind the bar and pulled out an open bottle of cranberry juice. "You should learn better taste in drinks." Canning the preamble, she pulled Casey towards her and poured it into her mouth. There was the expected result.

"Oh my fuc—Ouch. Shit, that hurts, Amber," Casey sputtered, roughly. Her throat was raw and her lips stung where acidic juice lingered. She felt like she'd just given a blowjob to a cheese grater.

"Poor Casey," she jibed, unsympathetic. "Your mouth was always going to get you in trouble."

Casey breathed through the pain and the bloody grit under her tongue. "That was uncalled for."

"No," Amber said. Pushing Casey away, she hopped off the stool and began to leave.

Casey spun around to follow her. "_No?_ What the hell is that for an answer?"

Amber kept walking. "It's an answer. Jesus, Novak, what kind of attorney were you?"

"Relevance?" Casey asked without thinking. That stopped her; Amber halted at the empty coat rack.

"Oh, no," she laughed in disbelief. "You did not just use a court objection at the end of the world. You're in contempt. End of story. Do not pass Go; do not collect anything. Get your ass out of here." The door swept open with the force of her annoyance and the sound of thunder nearly bowled them both over.

Ignoring it, Casey met her head-on in the middle of the bar, hands on hips and not up to anymore bullshit. "You nearly killed me and you would have if the mood had hit you. What happened to you, Amber? This isn't who you were when you were in med school. This isn't who you were when you fell in love with James." Amber's expression darkened to match the atmosphere of everything. She'd always been too bright, even at her worst.

"No, it isn't. You aren't who you were when you fell in love with that cop. You aren't even who you were when you realized that she would never love you like she loves every person that came before you." Casey stepped back. She was sorry she'd ever started this. Amber stepped towards her, a wry triumph written on her lips.

"Not her partner and not the pretty, practical, _normal_ blonde that made the world a better place. Eventually, you figure out that you're not all that important in scheme of things. All the people you love will love somebody else like you weren't ever there. The space you lived your life in will fill up; then, they'll be nothing there for you if, by some miracle, you manage to return." She scoffed. "You're not even dead and they've already left you behind."

Casey pursed her lips, refusing to be hurt by anything said by the girl she used to know. Something felt unbelievably wrong. "Your lines are convincing but your delivery is crap. Cut it, Amber. You don't have fits of pique because you feel unloved or insignificant. Remember, I've known you since before you could color in the lines. You don't like a situation, you change it. If you went back and James had a new girlfriend, she'd be on the first train to Kansas before she could make her case." Casey moved tentatively towards her. "What the hell is going on?"

Amber swept her arm around the room in one grand arc. "Armageddon, Casey. The old rules no longer apply."

"Then, go home. If you're so unhappy, if you're so lonely, go home! But don't hurt me. I haven't hurt you." Amber seemed determined to burn holes through Casey with her eyes. It wouldn't have worked when she was alive, but this _was_ the end of all things, it seemed a bit dim-witted to take chances. Incrementally, Casey began moving to the side.

"You really shouldn't be this entertaining. I'll never get to the Other Side if you keep this up." Amber flipped her perfect straw-hued hair. "I'm not going to kill you, or bore holes through your body with my eyes." She shrugged matter-of-factly. "I never wanted to do that. I never wanted to hurt you."

"Then, why did you?" Casey asked, exasperated. Their relationship had never come easy; yet, it had never been this painfully complex.

"You pushed and, for a change, I could push harder. I could push _really_ hard. So, I did and I went too far. I always go too far." Contrary to the apocalyptic storm that was beginning to truly rage in the streets outside, the lightning in Amber just went out.

Casey leaned on the back of a chair nearby and shrugged halfheartedly. "Forgive me if I don't go out of my way to prove you wrong."

Amber snorted and wrapped her arms around herself. Casey tucked her hands into the pocket of her pea coat; she felt the cold, too. The weather had been growing ever more intense with the passing hours.

It had begun with the animals and all manner of natural panic. It had continued when planes began to plummet, without warning, from the sky. It had reached crisis levels when those that had passed on, their bodies long since committed to final rest, had begun to appear—intact and whole, but invariably different. They were the equivalent of demigods. God knew they refused to die again. After that, a bit of a chill hardly pinged the general population's radar. If only it had remained a bit of a chill.

Thunder shook the Earth again. Casey grabbed the table top while Amber grabbed the wall. Even demigods were liable to fall when Heaven downsized.

Amber growled, "This is really getting on my nerves."

"Yeah," Casey goaded. "Then, do something about it."

Casey got a sparkling smirk in answer. "Best idea you've ever had." Amber grabbed her coat from the rack and donned with flourish. The ground continued to roll a bit, something they were both more than a little used to by now. She continued to walk and Casey was at a loss for what to do next.

Amber paused outside the door, eyes cast up at the blackening sky. "Hey, Novak. You in the mood for the trial of the millennium?"

Casey straightened up and edged towards where her old friend stood. She really wasn't in the mood to face God right now, if she'd ever be in the mood. Then again, Amber was certifiably dead. Things couldn't get much worse than that she supposed, so she answered:

"Yeah, why?"

Amber's true blue stare found hers and she was stopped short. "I can hear trumpets," she said, sounding wondrous and disbelieving all at once.

Casey fought the urge to withdraw and joined her friend outside. What she saw, she'd never thought she'd see. She'd left those lessons behind in Catholic school, where she thought they should stay, away from people in touch with science, who had a distant respect for faith. _Judgment Day_, she thought but couldn't believe.

As beautiful as it was—and beyond her ability to begin to describe—the cacophony that filled her ears was not divine song.

She grabbed hastily for Amber's hand and began to pull her away—away from the bar, away from the salt of the earth and its pillars, away from the trumpets.

Amber's long legs kept up with hers easily even as she resisted. "What are you doing? Why are we running? Didn't you hear--?"

Casey didn't dare turn back as her strides carried her farther down the street. She wasn't a god, demi- or high, however, she had watched enough television to know a sirens call when she heard it. Something was very wrong.

"I heard the trumpets, Amber," she growled, panting. "But did you hear the war drums?"

The formerly late doctor didn't ask any more questions, but Casey learned that even demigods had to run on their feet.

They moved no faster than man.


End file.
